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First, piracy is a copyright violation; piracy is NOT theft.

But to a address your point:

I'm not sure how busting people for making counterfeit hardcopy and selling them for money qualifies as a "corrupt scheme/racket".

The corrupt scheme is the inflating of the value of the so-called piracy by counting every blank disc as a pirated copy and lying like this for political purposes. This is the same immoral/sleazy tactic used by police to inflate the "street value" of seized marijuana plants. The corrupt cops count seeds, seedlings, leaves, stems, root balls, etc. when they know that only the bud of the pot plant gets sold and has real value. They lie this way to make the "crime" seem bigger.

This is the same reason the corrupt PI lies about the value of pirated material. But in this case, they're also doing it to influence corrupt, corporate-funded politicians to pass harsher laws.

The cause.

The effect.

Is our children learning?

the capability to create a hidden encrypted volume within another encrypted volume, thereby allowing you to grant access to unimportant/dummy data when a password is asked for without the attacker knowing additional information even exists.

Here is a story from a guy who had a similar solution in mind. Apparently the airport people get suspicious if the laptop runs something that they are not used to, like anything non-Windows.

On the other hand, he suggests that they are easily satisfied if you setup your laptop so it boots Windows by default and shows some normal-looking desktop; and that they are stupid enough not to suspect that there might be other operating systems installed if they don't show up in the boot menu.

Maybe it would suffice to setup your boot loader so that it boots Windows unless you press Shift or something like that.

There are a lot of different sites around depending on what you want:

• Debian help
• Debian Planet note not Debian Planet (Unfortunate naming collision there ..)
• Debian Forums - German
• Debian Administration

More can be found with your favourite search engine - disclaimer I run the last one on the list.

I just saw this posted in this article that Gartner predicts that half of U.S. IT operations jobs to vanish in 20 years.

There will be massive pressure all through the IT field in every occupation; if you're lucky enough to get a job, you know what the law of supply and demand will do to the pay.

As a computer professional, I would seriously recommend looking at another career field.

I would really like HP to step up its commitment to open source software by giving equal support to Debian on Proliant as it does to RH & SUSE. HP ships a load of drivers and useful agents (that throttle the fans back to something bearable) as rpms with a nice installer, but which works with supported distros only, AFAIK. Some people have managed the install indirectly using alien and a kernel recompile but surely HP can do better when they apparently use Debian as their internal development platform. It can't be stability issues with Woody, surely?

It's Debian *shrug*

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Debian is the fastest growing GNU/Linux distro :: debianHELP ... ... We use GNU! We use GNU... ..do you?! Debian is the fastest growing GNU/Linux
distro Posted by: IntnsRed on Thursday, January 29, 2004 - 12:14 AM. ...

www.debianhelp.org/ modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid= 3231
- 47k - Cached - Similar pages

debianHELP is also an excellent source of information, and has solved a couple of headaches for me in the past. :)

Try Debian Help or Debian Community or even one of the mailing lists. And, of course, you can usually get instant answers by asking on irc.debian.org.

There is plenty of good community support available for Debian. The only time I've ever seen anyone suggest "RTFM" is when someone posts nonsence questions to the developers mailing lists without bothering to check the various developers manuals. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect DEVELOPERS to RTFM. Users are a whole different subject.

I've run Debian for years, and I've always felt that other distros were better. After all, those other distros get much more press, they've got glitzy widgets and eye candy, and it's hard to resist that.

So about every 6 months I'll hear about a new version or distro and will give them a shot. I'll install them and make an honest effort to use it, rationalizing my choice just like the distro's marketing people want me to. But I always wind up throwing my hands up in disgust and thinking, "How can people use this crap from day to day?!"

Now, with many distros polluting the ideas of free software and open source -- feeding you a GPL license and then their own proprietary license which prevents you from copying CDs and giving them to all your friends or from installing on multiple computers -- there's more reason than ever to use Debian.

Debian's geek appeal is legendary. But now, with Debian's Desktop and Education sub-groups, the old idea of being proud of a geeky install is disappearing. Debian's beta installer is on par with every other distro's -- a fact that thousands of Debian users are eagerly awaiting.

Everyone's heard of apt-get and Debian's package management system. Yes, it's as slick as you've heard. But fewer people realize the huge scope of software available in Debian. I run all my desktop machines with Debian's "unstable" (think "unstable" as in changing; Debian's "unstable" release might have bugs, but there are certainly no more bugs in unstable than in the commercial release distros!). With that I have a huge selection of software -- over 10,000 packages. All of those packages are done by registered developers whose first job is to do it right.

When I read in Linux Journal or somewhere online about a nifty program XYZ123, I just try to install it -- 9 times out of 10 one of Debian's hundreds of developers has already packaged up XYZ123 for Debian. There's a huge advantage of having a distro that is controlled by geeks who like computers and who do this for the fun of it. Debian's developers are into GNU/Linux, and it shows.

On DebianHELP we call Debian "militantly free software". Yes, that's what it is. That militant attitude permeates Debian and this is Debian's strong point. I like the fact that Debian people worry about little details in the license agreements. I like the fact that Debian segregates non-free software into its own little slum. I like that Debian has a "social contract" and clear guidelines about what it's interested in and what it's not.

Many times I've often said to myself, "Gee, why are those guys worried about that stupid thing..." (e.g. the old KDE-QT license battles). But time and time again I'm proven wrong as the correct view turns out to be the morally miltant view. Besides turning out a first-rate distro with loads of software, Debian's role as GNU/Linux's moral compass is something we can't afford to lose.

There is such a site: http://www.debianhelp.org.

Interesting post on debianhelp.org, accusing some in the GNU community of acting like Microsoft with regard to community issues

"Thank you... as much as I love debian and linux in general you've finally put me into that category of people who think the support problem in the linux world is arrogance."

so it would be worth your while to pay for support, or buy a distribution which comes bundled with support, right?

"This [and the last post] is the only time I've gotten a bad attitude about this problem [or any other problems]."

the only time i gave you bad attitude was when you made it obvious that you didn't give a damn that i was trying to help you out.

"But please, let's be fair. Your attempt wasn't honest enough as it comes no where close to my problem. I'm sorry that you didn't help and that I've offended you because I told you it didn't."

you didn't sufficiently explain your problem, and when i gave you a suggestion (based on the information i had), you felt the need to flip me attitude. this is certainly different from telling me that i wasn't helpful.

"No where though did I resort to name calling."

nor did i. i freely admit that i insulted you, but i did not resort to name-calling. if i had, my message would have read something along the lines of:

"ask again in a few years, you prepubescent fuckwit."

...which it didn't. see the difference?

of course, there's no reason for me to call you names, since you've kindly done that for me. or is calling yourself "ImaLamer" merely a coincidence?

"I felt belittled by the fact that you acted as if you were supreme computer god..."

well, i may not be the supreme computer god... but at least i can install an operating system.

p.s.: look in dists/<distro>/main/disks-<arch>/curre nt/images-1.44/rescue.bin for your rescue disk image. the cd should be asking where you want to install the o.s. kernel & modules from... you want to select "cdrom". the installer should find the rescue image on it's own, though some unofficial images don't do this very well. if it prompts you, try pressing enter - some versions of the installer (such as 3.0.x, for installing woody) will search the cd when you do. i honestly don't remember if earlier versions do as well. worst case scenario, you have to enter the paths by hand. don't forget that you have that handy shell on the second console that you can use to poke around on the cd to find the correct path.

if it still doesn't work, get an official cd image instead. you might also find debianHELP useful.

I'm not sure if this is obvious or not, but if you have a good bit of free time, reading through posts on /. (on usage of linux for whatever reasons) might help. Even if you don't know exactly what's going on, you at least get exposure to the terms and methodologies.

A problem with a newbie reading /. is that there are a lot of people here posting things that are only partly accurate (or just plain nonsense). As a newbie it might be hard to filter those out. Therefore I think a newbie would learn more by reading Freshmeat or debianHelp or something and read slashdot for entertainment purposes only.

Except that debianhelp.org isn't running slash.

See this page for details.

From their about page: "Let's face it: GNU/Linux is Unix." (4 paragraphs down after the bold) What a glaring error this is (anyone remember a little ditty that goes something like this: "GNU'S NOT UNIX"?!?) Linux is Linux, GNU is GNU (and most definitely not UNIX). Both are UNIX-like and arguably better, but definitely not the same.

Other than that (a rather large philosophical error in my opinion) the site looks very nice. A very valuable resource, I think. The best of luck to them.

My winmodem doesn't work properly with Debian.

Then why did you pay your hard-earned precious money for a modem that was designed to work exclusively with Microsoft® brand Windows® brand systems and not with Debian GNU/Linux® systems?

Also..solitare and minesweeper don't seem to work.

What problems did you have getting XFree86, GNOME, and GNOME Mines to work? These are the kinds of questions you might want to ask at debianHELP.org.